With the multi-trillion dollar budgets spent in Washington, with corporate loopholes and bail-outs, have you ever stopped to wonder just where does all this money come from, and who is getting it?

The first number we have to look at is how much money do we borrow and spend?

According to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, we are borrowing 43 percent of every dollar the federal government spends.

Try that on your personal budget. See what happens if you run up a credit card bill every month that equaled 43 percent of your household budget. That means if your household income was $5,000 per month, you would charge another $3,772 on credit cards. Every month.

That’s how much the government borrows and spends every day. But they like to spend money, and since foreign countries are starting to pull back on giving it to them, they want to get more from us.

Now, they will say they only want to get it from some of us, like the richest of us, but let’s take a look and see who is getting a bigger piece of the pie — those working in the private sector or federal workers.

Some studies done by the CATO Institute have shown that federal employees make twice as much as private sector wage earners, but the liberal groups cried foul on the study, so Factcheck did their own study.

While criticizing Republicans for using CATO’s research, their numbers weren’t far off.

According to Factcheck, a federal employee’s average salary including benefits is $109,268 annually.

A private sector’s annual average salary including benefits is $61,051.

That’s a difference of $48,217 in favor of the federal worker.

Factcheck goes on to explain why part of the disparity exists, claiming that federal workers are more highly educated than their private sector counterparts. They also share that in 1985, 21 percent of federal employees were “blue collar” workers, but that number has dropped to 8 percent today due to outsourcing those lower-paid jobs.

In other words, the federal government doesn’t want to mess with paying janitors as federal employees, so they hire janitorial companies to do the “blue collar” stuff.

Outsourcing government jobs to the private sector is actually a smart move. The private sector can always outperform the government in any task.

The problem is the arrogance of the government to believe that the same is not true of the “white collar” jobs.

What would happen if the Department of Labor was completely outsourced? Or the Department of Transportation, Health and Human Services, and so on?

What if the government took bids on the duties and responsibilities of these departments? I wonder if customer service would improve, and if costs would decrease? I wonder if there are some workers out there, qualified workers, who would be happy to get a raise from $61,051 a year to $75,000 to replace someone in the federal government earning $109,268 per year, and do the job better because they know that their boss is trying to keep costs of the government contract down so that another private company doesn’t provide a lower bid.

The federal government doesn’t mind letting blue collar companies replace federal workers, but they aren’t going to do the same for the posh salaries at the top, are they?

Factcheck goes on to point out that cabinet-level jobs only make $199,700 per year while CEO’s of other company’s earn millions.

They fail to mention that those private sector CEO’s are mostly commission based and have to perform to earn their salary. The American people would gladly pay the cabinet secretaries $1 million per year if they could streamline billions in wasteful spending out of the government.

If these white collar people are so educated, why are they continuing to produce budgets that require borrowing 43 percent of their expenses to be borrowed? In the private sector, that gets you fired.

The government doesn’t need more money, it needs to cut spending. Privatizing management would be a good start.

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About The High Plains Daily Leader

The High Plains Daily Leader and Southwest Daily Times are published Sunday through Friday and reaches homes throughout the Liberal, Kansas retail trade zone. The Leader & Times is the official newspaper of Seward County, USD No. 480, USD No. 483 and the cities of Liberal and Kismet. The Leader & Times is a member of the Liberal Chamber of Commerce, the Kansas Press Association and the Associated Press.

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